Abstract
Red blood cells under shear flow present a specific swinging motion superimposed to a fluidlike tank-treading motion. Swinging is hypothesized to originate from periodic storage of shear energy in the cell membrane. Here we designed giant unilamellar vesicles with two lipid phases separated by a contact line, which swing and tank-tread like red cells. We propose a model that quantitatively fits our data, finds the value of the contact-line tension, and shows that swinging is due to the storage of elastic energy associated with the periodic modulation of the contact-line length during tank-treading.
- Received 4 February 2018
- Revised 23 April 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.3.123605
©2018 American Physical Society